Parenting constitutes an all-encompassing ecology of child development. Parents play central roles in childrens physical survival, social growth, emotional maturation, and cognitive development. The CFRS is therefore broadly concerned with analyzing and understanding the roles of parenting in human development. One study examined unique associations of multiple distal context variables (family SES, maternal employment, and paternal parenting) and proximal maternal (personality, intelligence, and knowledge; behavior, self-perceptions, and attributions) and child (age, gender, representation, language, and sociability) characteristics with maternal sensitivity and child responsiveness in 254 European American mothers and their firstborn 20-month-olds. Specific unique relations emerged in hierarchical regression analyses. Mothers who worked fewer hours per week and reported less dissonance in their husbands didactic parenting, whose children spoke using more vocabulary, and who reported less limit setting in their parenting and attributed their parenting failures to internal causes were observed to be more sensitive in their interactions with their children. Children in higher SES families, whose mothers worked fewer hours and attributed their parenting failures to internal causes, and who themselves used more vocabulary were observed to be more responsive in their interactions with their mothers. Although potential associations are many, when considered together unique associations with maternal sensitivity and child responsiveness are few, and some are shared whereas others are unique.[unreadable] [unreadable] Responsiveness defines the prompt, contingent, and appropriate reactions parents display to their children in the context of everyday exchanges. Maternal responsiveness occupies a theoretically central position in developmental science and possesses meaningful predictive validity over diverse domains of childrens development, yet basic psychometric features of maternal responsiveness are still poorly understood. In a prospective longitudinal study, we examined the structure, individual variation, and continuity of multiple dimensions of responsiveness in mothers to their infants activities at 10, 14, and 21 months during natural home-based play interactions. Both age-general and age-specific patterns emerged in maternal responding. The developmental results support the multidimensionality, modularity, and specificity of this central parenting construct.[unreadable] [unreadable] Two additional studies looked at childcare. We investigated the long-term cumulative effects of two common indices of childcare -- the total number of hours of nonmaternal care and the mean hour-weighted child-to-caregiver ratio per caregiving situation -- on mental development and socioemotional adjustment from birth to 4 years in a non-risk middle-class sample of girls and boys after taking into consideration child (gender and sibling status), maternal (education and concepts of child development), and family selection (SES) factors. Childcare indices did not differ in girls and boys year-by-year. Children experienced less nonmaternal care in their first year of life, but afterward children encountered more children in their caregiving situations in proportion to the number of caregivers. At 4 years, girls scored higher on cognitive and language measures than boys, and boys exhibited more externalizing problem behaviors than girls. Hours of nonmaternal care were not a predictor; however, child-to-caregiver ratio was. For cognitive outcomes, ratio exerted a positive effect on children from higher SES backgrounds versus no effect on children from average or lower SES backgrounds. For adjustment outcomes, higher ratio was associated with fewer behavioral problems in girls and more behavioral problems in boys. Different basic indices of childcare appear to have different long-term cumulative effects for different domains of development in girls and boys. In a complementary childcare study, we defined 3 distinct groups based on the infants principal childcare experience: infants reared exclusively at home by their mothers, infants reared in their own homes but by a nonfamilial childcare provider, and infants reared in nonfamilial homes in group care. At 4 years of age, we compared mothers and teachers independent views of the communication, daily living, socialization, and motor adaptive behaviors of girls and boys with these different infant childcare histories, after taking multiple family selection factors into consideration. Boys who had other-home-group-care in infancy expressed lower levels of overall adaptive functioning, as well as communication, daily living, and socialization skills, than girls. Girls with other-home-group-care in infancy had better adaptive daily living and socialization skills than girls who had maternal care. We conclude that different infant childcare experiences appear to predict different adaptive behaviors in boys and girls.